In "soft" sciences like sociology, it's much more difficult to detect
manipulation of research, than in "hard" sciences like physics. Soft
science researchers who strive for objectivity deserve an extra
measure of respect. Sadly, far too many researchers are more
concerned with pushing an agenda than with objectivity. These same
problems are not unknown in the world of journalism.
Since the soft sciences and the media have a powerful influence on
social policies in this country, this affects every family and every individual.

is about the broken "science" that's being used
to create law and drive social policy.

For decades, government policy on domestic violence has been, and
continues to be, predicated on the erroneous belief that the
overwhelming majority of cases involve a man brutally abusing a
helpless woman, and that the number of male victims and female abusers
is negligible. Contradicting this belief, the U.S. Dept. of Justice's
1998 National Violence Against Women Survey found that 834,732 men are
victimized annually. (See exhibit 7, p. 7 of http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/172837.pdf)
Yet the policy implications section of that report virtually
ignored the finding that there are a significant number of
abused men who also need services.

How can this be? I recently stumbled onto a statement by Murray Straus
which I believe explains this apparent paradox. For those who do not
know who Straus is, let me explain that he is one of the U.S.'s leading
authorities in the research of family violence. It was his work in the
early 1970s that made the study of family violence a legitimate topic
for scientific research. He has been a professor of sociology at the
University of New Hampshire since 1968, is founder and Co-Director of
UNH's Family Research Laboratory, conducted the First and Second National
Family Violence Surveys in 1975 and 1985, and continues to
be active in the research to this day. In 2006, he
presented results of his 32-nation International Dating Violence Study.

On August 15, 2002, Straus was a guest on the radio show
"The Exchange" hosted by Laura Knoy on NH Public
Radio. During that show, Straus said that the
researchers who did the National Violence Against Women
Survey for the Dept. of Justice tried to bias it by
intentionally omitting questions that could show women in a
negative light and neglecting to include men in the
study. The researchers did not originally intend to
include men in the study at all. They only did so after a
great deal criticism by other researchers who wanted the
study to be conducted in an unbiased fashion, among them
Straus. Straus' words are below. Click
here to listen to audio clip of this segment of the
radio show.

When I first heard the show, the significance of Straus' comments
didn't hit me. It was only recently, as I was cleaning up old files on
my computer, that I listened to the show again and realized that it
offers an explanation of why the D.O.J. study's policy implications
section makes no mention of the fact that, contrary to popular belief
and the researchers' expectations, men constitute 36% of victims of
physical assault by an intimate partner.

When researchers approach a topic in an unbiased fashion, one would
expect their report to highlight the most surprising results. In this
case, one would expect the policy implications section to have included
a statement like, "Of the victims in our survey, 36% are men, a
dramatically higher percentage than the generally believed 5%, and
services need to be developed to address the unique needs of this
population." But in this case the researchers treated this result as
the elephant in the room that everybody's politely trying not to
notice. It's impossible not to wonder what their true agenda is, and
whether the number of male victims would have been notably higher than
36% if the researchers had conducted their work in an impartial fashion.

Mark Rosenthal

Straus' Comments on "The Exchange", Hosted by Laura Knoy, Broadcast
August 15, 2002 on NH Public Radio:

Below is my transcription of the relevant portion of the
show. Be aware that transcribing from spoken words is
always tricky since people don't speak the way they
write. I've done my best to preserve the meaning while
trying to make the printed form readable. The
authoritative source for what Straus said is the audio clip
of his comments which
can be heard by clicking here.

In this portion of the show, another guest had proposed
that academic researchers should partner with the battered women's
shelters to figure out how to get the violence to end.

Straus responded:

"I tried to do that. I haven't tried for a number of
years because the people I tried to do it with insisted on my using a
biased instrument."

Interviewer:
"What do you mean by that?"

Straus:

"Well, I'm the developer of the Conflict Tactics Scales.
This instrument lists things that might happen when there's a conflict
or when people are just plain feeling out of sorts, or lousy, or angry
for whatever reason. The instrument asks, 'Did these things happen?'

"It includes various acts that the partner can do, and that the
respondent – the person being interviewed – might do. They refused to
ask the questions about what the respondent did. When they were
interviewing women respondents, they insisted on asking only questions
about what the partner did.

"That same procedure was carried over into the National Institute of
Justice National Violence Against Women study. They asked what they
call a 'feminist version' of the Conflict Tactics Scale, that asks only
about victimization and leaves out the questions about perpetration.
And of course if you do that, you will have to find that only men are
violent.

"It was only after much pressure from people like myself that they then
added a second sample, of men, to find this out. As a result of this,
even though this study is biased in a number of ways, some of them
unintentional, some of them intentional, they found that 40% of the
past year assaults were perpetrated by women. This is a national
sample of 16,000, so it's huge and very dependable."